“I’ve had it pointed out to me by some male journalists that there are no good men in the movie,” Anna Kendrick says of her directorial debut Woman of the Hour. “It is true... I suppose there aren’t any nice guys.”
Men do come off incredibly poorly in this retelling of the haunting true story of the women and girls who encountered serial killer Rodney Alcala in Seventies America. But Kendrick – who stars in the film too – is clear that this is no true crime hagiography that lingers over the twisted genius of a murderer; instead it looks at how society enabled him to kill again and again.
“He was caught many times, and the culture was not set up to protect victims,” she says. “It seemed set up to protect violent men. He was an impulsive, pathetic little man. And the only reason he got away with it for so long is because nobody seemed to care.”
Daniel Zovatto brings an appropriate level of dead-eyed menace to the lank-haired killer, who bizarrely appeared on innuendo-laden TV show The Dating Game in real life during his murderous rampage. But the real horror is the rest of the crappy men operating on a spectrum of really awful to just kind of useless.
There are the casting directors pushing Sheryl Bradshaw, the struggling actor played by Kendrick, to get her kit off and talking like she isn’t there – some of the verbatim moments the director added from her own Hollywood experience. The over familiar neighbour whose overtures at friendship are only made to get into Bradshaw’s pants. Cops who can’t do their job. Security guards who mess with vulnerable women. A nice guy boyfriend who doesn’t even realise he’s gaslighting his girlfriend into denying her instincts about the killer.
“There’s this scene in a car where she's trying to explain what's happening – I remember him doing the first take and going, ‘Should I be more confrontational, more of a dick, basically?’ And I was like, ‘No, I think it's way more heartbreaking that you're really in love with her and you really see yourself as a kind of capital ‘N’ Nice Guy, but you're absolutely letting her down in this moment’.”
In the film, Sheryl is a contestent on The Dating Game – think Blind Date in the UK – and picks the killer bachelor number three, which really happened. What follows is an imagined date between them (the real woman was so creeped out she pulled out of the date), interwoven with the stories of his crimes. Kendrick queasily reconstructs the world where Alcala could get away for so long with raping and often murdering his eight confirmed victims, the youngest of whom was just eight years old.
The only man who elicits sympathy is the young copy boy at the Los Angeles Times who narrowly escapes becoming one of the killer’s targets – Alcala took explicit photographs of young men as well as women, and his victims could have numbered well over 100.
“It really isn't about everything falling on gender lines,” says Kendrick. “It's about who's holding power. Anybody can fall victim to these systems right now, but certainly in the Seventies the power was consolidated around men.”
It’s left to women to protect each other as best they can with limited power. A survivor and a witness try to alert the authorities. A waitress refuses to serve another drink. A make-up artist couches a warning. It all casually articulates the central question of women romantically interacting with men: “Which one of you is going to hurt me?”
It’s a question Kendrick explored in her recent film Alice, Darling, where she played the titular character as she tries to escape a nightmarish relationship. Kendrick was candid about how that role was close to her heart, having recently been in a long-term emotionally abusive relationship herself. On the Armchair Expert podcast she described how a partner of six years morphed into “a stranger that scared the shit out of me”.
Did she bring her understanding of trauma to directing a film with such traumatic themes? “I was acutely aware of how much I was asking of all of the actors, and I don't say that lightly,” she answers, carefully. “In this film there are roles where I was asking people to show up for a couple of days and, with very limited screen time, get the viewer to fall in love with them, invest in them, be desperately concerned with what happens to them and, and then try to fight for their life.”
As an actor herself, Kendrick understands implicitly how little bodily autonomy the job entails. “You are treated like you're the performing monkey and it's time for you to turn it on,” she says. “I knew that experience pretty intimately.” Scenes where her own character gets shuttled, prodded and insulted round the backstage of a set offer a glimpse into the real life of an actor.
At 39 years old, you might think Kendrick doesn’t get pushed around on set like a doll any more. “Are you kidding? I mean girl, [it happens] to this day. It's hard because you have to accept that this is part of the gig. It is someone's job to make sure that your collar is straight or your hair doesn't have flyaways. But it also does mean that grown adults are coming up to you and touching you.”
Kendrick has been in the business for a while. She was nominated for a Tony award at the tender age of 12, for her role in a Broadway production of the musical High Society. There was an early role in Twilight, but her break-out moment was Pitch Perfect, the acapella troupe behemoth that combined her acting talent and musical chops. Since then she’s run the gamut of rom-coms and musical adaptations, while voicing troll queen Poppy for the family-friendly Trolls animated films.
As a follow up to Alice, Darling, Woman of the Hour is a much darker turn. But Kendrick’s natural empathy as a director clearly had an impact. “I didn't realise until the actors started doing press that it had become a bit of a joke, what a cry-baby I was on set,” she laughs. “They’ve all told a story about me coming out from behind the monitor just in tears. I was thinking I was this stoic leader, but apparently I was a real blubbering mess.”
She originally signed on to star and co-produce but, “I found myself getting a bit obsessed with the script, and perhaps overstepping at times because for a couple of years, it was not my film.”
When the original director Chloe Okuno dropped out, Kendrick felt she had to step in. “I started to feel heartbroken at the idea of anybody else doing it,” she says. “I saw a real opportunity to take all of those themes that I thought I saw in the script and to bring those forward as much as I could.” While Okuno’s wheelhouse is very much horror, Kendrick admits she’s “never even been in a scary film before”.
A six-week re-write process with collaborating screenwriter Ian McDonald brought a new ending. At Kendrick’s insistence, they included a story that echoes that of Monique Hoyt, the 15-year-old raped by Alcala in 1979 who managed to play along until she could escape at a gas station and alert the police. Autumn Best, cast as the character of Amy, plays the role with a ferocious survival instinct. It’s a triumphant moment immediately undercut by the sobering facts relayed by the epilogue: that Alcala was bailed and continued to kill.
“The whole point of the story is that this went on for so fucking long and nobody gave a shit.”
“The danger was if we make that the ending of the film, then it seems like there's a happy ending,” Kendrick says. “Ian and I didn't feel that we'd really cracked it until we were looking at the epilogue and we figured out a way to include some of the pretty devastating details of what happens after the events of the film. Like, ‘Yes, we're happy he's been arrested, but the story didn't end there.’ Frankly the whole point of the story is that this went on for so fucking long and nobody gave a shit”
Kendrick does give a shit. Her depictions of violence against women walk the knife edge between horror without tipping into the voyeuristic. There are no crime scene photos or autopsies; sexual violence is implied but not exposed. “We can't keep the viewer comfortable because that wouldn't feel right. But at the same time, you don't want it to be exploitative,” she says. “I think our imaginations are always so much worse than anything you could put on film.”
That doesn’t mean she pulls any directorial punches, though. In the opening scene, the killer strangles, revives, then murders a woman against a beautiful west coast landscape. “I was following the No Country for Old Men model where, you open with something pretty violent and then you can start pulling back from there,” she says.
Ultimately, she decided to have the sounds of the woman’s final struggle played over B Roll of the wide-open landscape and endless seeming sky. “It felt better to keep this woman connected to something so much bigger than this tiny little pathetic man.”
Central to the film’s message is that it could have been any of us. “I feel like we're all living the same story sometimes,” says Kendrick. “We all have an anecdote about a time that everything seemed fine and then suddenly you're alone with someone who's a lot bigger than you and wondering ‘Oh God, how bad is this situation about to get?’”
Each actress already cast to play the women who encountered Alcala was also a trained singer. So, Kendrick got them in a room together to record their voices and create a multi-layered noise that raises the hairs on the audience’s neck.
“It’s a cacophonous sound that comes in when a woman has realised something is wrong,” is how she describes it. “It almost feels like these hundreds of voices of women trying to crawl through time to warn this other woman or perhaps be with her in this moment.”
In wading into the murky swamp of true crime, Kendrick is clear in her goal for turning the serial killer trope on its head by centring the women he preyed on. “It was really important to frame all of these women as beautiful people with rich complicated lives beyond the moment that we're meeting them,” says Kendrick. “Because mostly we're meeting them on the worst day of their life.”
There is no blame to be cast in the film except on the killer and his enablers. The idea that anyone could be sufficiently savvy to ward off predators is anathema to Kendrick. “Couldn't she tell he was a creep? Why did she get in a car with him? Didn’t she see the warning signs? It’s all a fucking trap. On the one hand, you're paranoid. On the other hand, how did you put yourself in that situation?”
This is not a cautionary tale for women, then, but rather a damning indictment of a culture that allows violence against them. “My dream about the film would be that it opens up some questions about all the ways that victim blaming is baked into us, culturally.”
